Bill would ban smoking at federal buildings

The bill, introduced late Friday by Rep. Susan Davis (D-Calif.), would ban smoking in and 25 feet around all properties owned or leased by the federal government. Smoking areas — located inside or just outside some federal properties — also would be shuttered.

“Exposure to secondhand smoke is a serious health issue that drives up health care costs for all of us,” Davis said in a statement announcing her bill. “Federal workers should be able to work in a healthy, smoke-free environment.”

Efforts to ban smoking at federal buildings have a long, complex history (but what federal personnel issue doesn’t?). In 1997, Bill Clinton banned smoking in most federal workplaces with an executive order that permitted federal buildings to establish smoking rooms.

“While we will continue to seek ways to assist employees in quitting smoking, the reality is that there are employees who will continue to smoke,” Colleen M. Kelly, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, told The Post in late 2008 when GSA announced the policy change. “It is important that they have a place to go that is away from other employees and safe for them as well.”

Davis is not the first lawmaker to try to snuff out federal smokers: Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) previously introduced bills in 2008 and 2009 that would have made GSA’s change in policy a federal law. Both attempts failed.

If passed, Davis’s bill would apply only to executive branch properties and not congressional office buildings, meaning smokers, including House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and other lawmakers, could still use the balcony off the Speaker’s Lobby and other Capitol Hill locales to light up. Each federal agency head would be left to enforce the new law, according to Davis's office. The law would not apply at the White House, whose primary resident, President Obama, was recently declared “tobacco free” by his doctors.

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Ed O’Keefe has covered Congress and national politics since 2008. He has also covered federal agencies and federal employees in the Washington area, the war in Iraq, and the 2016 presidential campaigns of Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio.